Like many middle-class
Albuquerque neighborhoods,
Las Alturas exhibits
a quietly gentrified uniformity,
with kelly-green lawns and blooming
gardens fronting the overwhelmingly
Pueblo, Territorial,
or brick-and-stucco Ranch style
homes. There are a few standouts—
like the elegantly modern
pop of steel and glass with knifeedged
corners—along with a few
head-scratchers, such as the mini
Mediterranean villa with a massive
red-tiled roof that can probably
be seen from outer space.

But there is nothing quite like
the two-story composition of concrete
block, corrugated metal, and
sage-green stucco that sits on—
or soars above, depending on your
point of view—a slightly elevated,
narrow strip of what was one of
Las Alturas’s few remaining residential
lots in the 1990s. Designed
and built in 1993 by Bart Prince
for Christopher Mead, Regents’
Professor of Architecture and
Professor of Art History at the
University of New Mexico, and
his wife, photographer Michele
Penhall, the home at first seems
like a totally alien construct.

No doubt it’s a thrill to come upon
something built by Bart Prince,
especially when it’s in the middle
of a residential neighborhood.
I remember feeling downright
giddy watching the architect’s own
home and studio go up on another
slender residential lot, this one
on Buena Vista just off Carlisle,
during the early 1980s. Even
today, this bold compendium of
the organic and the space age still
contains something of the shock
of the new, a burst of laughter
amid the hushed tones of its quietly
respectful Southwestern-style
neighbors. Even when he works
at a remote site, Prince’s architecture
forces a conversation about
the relationship between the built
environment, the natural world,
and what it is, exactly, we expect
from our homes.

“Some people think that architecture
has to blend in so that it
doesn’t somehow insult its natural
environment,” says Prince. “You
can do that—blend in. You can
also stand apart and make a statement.
Or you can do a combination
of both, which is what I do.”
As individualistic and convention-
shattering in his art as Picasso
was in his, Prince is not primarily
concerned with making shapes
but with solving problems—of climate,
site, geography, and client
need and want—even though this
may not immediately be apparent.
Whether undulating or jutting,
crashing or angling, oozing or
digging in, his forms can initially
seem riotously at odds with their
function, prompting the viewer
to ask, “What, if any, method is
there to this madness?”

Plenty, as it turns out. Bart Prince’s
work may not be formulaic, but neither is it capricious. Using his own home/
studio as an example, he explains: “This is the process I go through for every
building—before I even begin to design the structure. I start with the physicality
of the site: where are the utilities, how do you get in and out, how tall are
the trees, what’s around the lot, where does the winter sun come in? Where
do I want my studio to be, my bedroom, my private spaces? I think first in
an abstract sense, and it grows from there . . . I manifest those ideas into a
physical solution to the problem.”

Although the solution is neither exclusively practical, nor even intellectual.
There is, says Prince, an important emotional element to his work as well,
one that arises out of his desire to express something that is beyond the
sum of the parts. “A house has to be more than the bedroom, the living room,
the cost of its materials. You have to breathe life into it.”

Mead recognized this immediately. “As a historian, I knew that I would
be lucky to have Bart design a house, because . . . I would be contributing to
the history of American architecture. At the same time . . . Bart’s pragmatic
method of design meant that he would respond seriously and thoughtfully
to our site, to our program, to our tight budget, and that he would answer
our needs—not design a trophy house that was more about his ego than our
comfort. We would get the best of both worlds: a significant work of architecture that is precisely tailored
to our practical requirements and emotional interests.”

The result is a house that works on an emotional, intellectual, and economic level. Materials like corrugated
metal, cedar plywood, and stucco helped Prince meet Mead’s tight budget (the house was built
for only $65 per square foot) while also allowing the architect to transform their simplicity into something
beautiful as well as practical.

The downstairs—which contains the guest room, master suite, and the couple’s separate offices—is all
about the imperatives of their private and work life. Upstairs, the 100-foot-long expanse—with its curved
ceilings and walls and strategically placed windows—is the couple’s public space, one that showcases
their relationship to each other, their extensive collection of artwork, and the neighborhood around them.
Sited in line with the winter solstice, the home is also about the connection between interior and exterior,
offering extensive views of the mountains to the east and the mesas to the west, and directing the everpresent
New Mexican light.

Beyond its beauty and its functionality, there is something almost hushed and reverent about the
home’s interior. Mead concurs: “In many ways, the form is like a Spanish Mission church: simple, readily
available materials used to create a monumental space. We tend to separate the sacred and the profane.
Bart conflates the two. I don’t think it’s a deliberate choice, but one based on the notion that daily life is
important. Why not celebrate it?”

Prince worked similarly with a client who was moving from Santa Fe to a small rural community outside
the city. After living in a conventional Santa Fe-style home for many years, she wanted something different.
“The two things I asked for,” she says, “was a connection between the inside and the outside because the
setting is so beautiful. My second requirement was a real sense of space, but more as an aesthetic than a
measurement. That’s it. Otherwise, why hire an architect if you’re going to tell
him what to do

She chose Prince based on a friend’s recommendation, never guessing that
he would actually answer his own phone, much less agree to her limited budget.
“His response was: ‘I should meet you onyour
land and we’ll go from there,’”
she remembers. “Nothing about how big did I want my house or what my budget
was. I got the sense that Bart [is instead motivated by] the challenge of doing
something unique and rising to the occasion.”

When he finally finished her drawings, she says, “He sent me an email that
began, ‘Remember me?’ He was so excited by what he’d done. There’s a difference
between someone who presents you with his ego and someone who is
enthusiastic. Bart is enthusiastic.”

The final designs were shocking. “But in a good way,” she explains. “The plan
was so integrated and intact, so meaningful from one part to the other, it was
almost impossible to edit it. Everything made so much sense that to tweak it
would have destroyed its integrity.”

Although Prince has accepted commissions from around the world, it is
worth noting that so many of his homes are built in the American West.
It is not a deliberate choice on his part, he says, nor does he seek commissions.
Still, those who hire him are responding to something in Prince’s work, a boundless
spirit and tenacious vision that is perfectly in keeping with the region’s
mythos of rugged individualism.

Born in Albuquerque and raised for a time in Santa Fe, Prince boasts a
family tree whose branches extend all the way back into
the earliest days of New Mexico’s history. (His great
grandfather LeBaron Bradford Prince was governor;
his grandfather William Prince a rancher in Española; and
his father, Brad Prince, owned one of Albuquerque’s top
advertising agencies.) But Bart Prince would not follow in
any of their footsteps. Even as a child all he wanted to do
was be an architect, even if the did not yet know the exact
name for this impulse. After graduating high school in the
mid-1960s, he began studies at the College of Architecture
at Arizona State University, immersing himself in the history
of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. It was here
that he also met his mentor, Bruce Goff.

In spite of his upbringing, the design vernacular of the
American Southwest held little appeal for Prince. At least
not in the traditional sense. “At five years old, I remember
looking at Santa Fe and saying to myself, ‘Boy, this is
an ugly place.’ I appreciate its natural environment, what
the Native Americans built—with honesty and for its function—
but I’ve never thought that actual imitation was a
solution to any problem.”

Which is something that greatly appealed to his rural
client. “I think if we are going to build a home, we need to
justify doing so in a different and not conventional way,”
she says. “Santa Fe is receptive to contemporary art, but
there is a lag when it comes to architecture.”

It is important to understand that Prince does not completely
reject the traditions of Southwestern architecture. If anything,
he is acutely aware of the need out of which it sprung and the
brilliance of those early architects’ solutions—from the Chaco builders
to the Territorial Spanish. It is the reasoning behind the vernacular that
is of value to us today, not its mindless duplication.

“I think a lot of Bart’s work has to do with the modernization of
certain of these traditions,” says Mead. For instance, siting a home
to take advantage of winter sun, deflecting wind, and using traditional
New Mexican building materials like wood, stucco, concrete
block, and sheet metal. “And then he asks, ‘how do these traditions
function and look today?’ Bart knows a lot about the history of New
Mexico, and he knows its people survived over thousands of years in
harsh conditions exactly because they were able to change.”

Free of the need to protect ourselves against marauding bands of
outlaws and with our harsh climate tamed by central heating and air
conditioning, our architecture can also be freed from certain of its traditional
dictates. Perhaps that is why Prince’s homes always appear to
be on the move, not anchored to the ground, bunker-like, but seeming
to rise above it, like great ships, insects, or birds about to take flight.

“I often say my homes are difficult to photograph because they
don’t stand still long enough to have their picture taken,” Prince
says. “You are not just walking into a box with a bunch of holes in
it; you are battling gravity and the horizon line, but not in a negative
sense. The idea is to work with space that radiates out in all directions
and build something that resists that gravity, that is part of
the earth and yet appears lighter.”

So the question becomes: can we—dare we?—change the paradigm
of suburban Southwestern architecture? Some might say that
doing so is too expensive, that it is one thing for a multi-millionaire
to build a custom home on a seaside cliff somewhere in California
but quite another to do so in Anytown USA.

Prince balks. “People think good architecture has to be expensive,
and it doesn’t,” he says, pointing out that many of his homes,
including his own, had tight budgets. “I have a number of clients
with limited resources who wanted something more. They didn’t
like what they were seeing, and they realized that something more
is available to them.”

Economics aside, other critics maintain that suburban neighborhoods
must remain uniform for aesthetic and cultural reasons.
Again, Prince disagrees, pointing out that perhaps part of the problem
is that we “accept the houses we are given” because we fear
asserting ourselves in the environment.

“We humans have a right to be here and express ourselves,
and we don’t have to be bashful about it,” he says. “Yes, there are
extremes—we don’t have to plunk down a Wal-Mart box with no
sensitivity to the existing environment—but at the risk of saying
that we can improve nature, I have to say that I believe that we
are as much a part of nature, of the earth, as anything else. When
you can’t imagine a site without the house, when you have made
someone experience the environment around them in a way they
normally would not have, then you know you have succeeded.”